As the Internet has become widespread in recent years, a PC (personal computer) can be used to collect various items of information and purchase goods or services without visiting a store, as is well known.
Examples of such sites provided for collecting information include sites displaying for comparison the selling prices of computer-related products or electric appliances available at a number of stores. A user (customer) who has decided to buy a particular commodity (product model) can use such a site to find a store (supplier) selling the model at the lowest price and purchase it. Services provided by such a site are very useful to the user because he/she can purchase goods at the most advantageous price without actually visiting a number of stores.
The services as described above are useful to a user who has decided to buy a particular model. However, they are not necessarily useful to a user who has not yet decided on any particular model. That is, the user who has decided on the particular product only needs to compare prices, which vary from store to store. On the other hand, the user who has not decided on a particular product yet or wants to decide on a product based on a number of factors besides its price, needs to weigh a large number of items of information against each other, taking a lot of time and effort for the comparison.
For example, if a user wants to buy a used car, it is difficult for the user to decide on a car based on simple comparison of prices even if he/she has chosen a particular model, because different cars of that model have different prices according to their model years and states.
When the user inputs criteria such as a car type, a model year, color, and price range on a site dealing with commodities such as used cars, the site simply extracts information about used cars that meet the input criteria from a database containing data input beforehand by a plurality of dealers and lists the extracted information about the used cars on the personal computer of the user. The user narrows down candidates based on the displayed information about the used cars to ultimately select one or more used cars from the list. Then the user contacts a dealer or dealers selling the selected cars to obtain further information and negotiate with the dealer or dealers about terms of purchase to ultimately purchase a used car.
When the user chooses one or more used cars, he/she uses an e-mail address linked with the site to send e-mail to each dealer or use a telephone number provided on the site to make a phone call each dealer.
In this method, the service provider only provides a service for listing the used cars that meet the criteria specified by the user. The narrowing the list, contact with the dealer, and negotiation with the dealer are practically excluded from the service provided through the Internet. This is much the same as selecting used cars from a list in a used-car magazine and contacting dealers.
Furthermore, if the user cannot find his/her desired used car through the first search, he/she would continually repeat the search at intervals. Because the user would repeat the search using the same criteria, the same used cars previously retrieved would be repeatedly displayed. Thus, time is wasted for viewing the search results, causing the user to find the search cumbersome and eventually leading to a decrease in the number of users of that search service.
The dealer, on the other hand, only displays goods on its site on the Internet and, after being contacted by the customer, the transaction is the same as that of businesses before the introduction of the Internet commerce. Thus, the dealer also does not take full advantage of the use of the Internet.
These problems are not limited to the used-car dealing illustrated above. They are common to sites providing other commodities and services.